"The Destruction of Civil Society"
By Bill Bonner
"This month, we look at a number of dots, all grouped… like a constellation far out in space… as “The Great Reset.” The various planets and stars seem so “far out,” we have a hard time believing that it will ever really affect our lives. A switch to windmills rather than internal combustion engines… eating bugs rather than steaks… getting permission to travel, rather than traveling freely… compulsory anti-racist training… gender studies for six-year-olds… government spending nearing 50% of GDP… Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)… and double-digit real inflation.
There are some strange critters out there, we used to tell ourselves… in a galaxy far, far away. But they won’t get here during our lifetimes! Or so we hoped. And then, they started showing up.
Niagara of Liquidity: At current budget levels, for example, the U.S. government is spending 45% of GDP. Add medical care, in which the feds play a major role, and the U.S. now has about the same level of government involvement in the economy as France. And whoever expected the feds to send out stimmy checks to up to 165 million people – 75% of whom, apparently, had lost neither job nor income – not once, but three times? And even with this Niagara of liquidity flowing their way – so much that U.S. households are said to have more money than ever before – the feds are now considering “round 4” or even “round 5” of their stimmy efforts.
Aid and Succor: The effect of all this aid and succor from the federales is twofold. First, it weakens the citizens’ desire and ability to take care of themselves. “You get what you pay for,” said Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. And when the government pays for idleness and dependence, it gets plenty of both. With so much money available from stimmy checks, fewer people want to work in the Main Street economy… and even fewer want to invest in it. This shows up in the most obvious ways. The economy produces fewer and fewer goods and services, while the government produces more and more money. The result is inflation.
The second thing the feds’ aid and succor does is to make any change of direction impossible. Once you’re on this Road to Hell, you can’t turn around. Because the political pressure – from the desperate zombies you created… who now need more and more red meat from government giveaway programs… forces reformers and deniers into hiding. Inevitably, standards of living fall. So the federales need to plan for poverty and disguise it as virtue. Eating bugs, for example, as Dan explains in this month’s Bonner-Denning Letter. [Paid-up subscribers can catch up here. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here.]
Culture of Poverty: But the United States of America is not the first or only country to deliberately impoverish itself. Argentina is way ahead, having begun its “Reset” back in the 1940s. That was when Juan Domingo Perón figured out that he could win an election by promising the zombies of Buenos Aires meat from the pampas at discount prices. This was achieved by taxing and regulating the farm sector for the benefit of the urban proletariat. And so developed the “culture of poverty” – penalizing the productive sectors in order to support the more numerous zombie voters, and thus stay in power. And it continues today, seven decades later.
The “conservative” reformer Mauricio Macri, president of Argentina from 2015 to 2019, tried to break the cycle by liberating the farm sector. Instead, it broke him. Macri was defeated in the last elections. And now, the new “Peronist” government is up to its old tricks. Last week, it announced a prohibition on the export of beef. The producers suffer… But the masses get cheaper beef.
This is very bad news for Argentina… It needs revenues from exports. It’s bad news for your editor, too, who was counting on high beef prices to make sense of his investment in a cattle farm down there. But it goes to show how easily real investment can be stymied… and how readily the “culture of poverty” prevails. James Nielson at the Buenos Aires Times writes: "Poverty has always been normal, and the widespread prosperity which benefits most people, that today can be found in many parts of the world, is an aberration."
How do you like your cockroaches, Dear Reader? Well done?"
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